Final Thoughts on the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 Steel Legend OC
Finally we have a second choice when it comes to new graphics cards! If you remember, AMD was actually supposed to announce these cards at CES back in January but seemed to pull the plug last minute. We know this because many brands actually were showing off their Radeon RX 9070 series cards at the show, but couldn’t tell us more more than that. We assume AMD was waiting to see what NVIDIA would do and of course see their pricing.
Now that both the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) are here gamers can really make a definitive choice on what card they want to pick up at this performance level and price point. Coming down to the numbers at 1440p we saw an average FPS of 137.28 across our seven games. With these type of numbers it is going to be a very solid 1440p card (as it was designed to be of course). We saw about a 15% performance uplift over AMD’s own Radeon RX 7900 GRE and when we compare to NVIDIA cards the results were a bit all over the place and some of results were a bit abnormal. I would say in general this card performs slightly better than the NVIDIA RTX 5070 and sort of sits between the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super. If you are wondering about 4K performance our average FPS across our seven game test was 83.06. So this could suffice as a 4K card and the 16GB of VRAM definitely helps.
If you want even more performance you can of course enable FSR4. Instead of just enabling it within your game you can enable it in the driver software either globally or on a per-game basis. It is pretty easy to do once you know how to do it. What is nice about FSR4 is that it will work with any game that supports FSR 3.1 so there are already a bunch of titles that it will work on. In our testing we were able to essentially double our frame rate with FSR4 with frame generation.
ASRock’s Steel Legend OC card is quite nice and is their premium offering for the Radeon RX 9070. You are going to get a slight overclock, triple-fan cooling solution, full-coverage metal backplate, and of course all of that RGB lighting. The cooling solution is extremely quiet which was really impressive and the card is going to look excellent in your build.
The big thing with graphics cards especially this cycle is pricing and more importantly if you can get these cards at their MSRP. First off AMD set the MSRP for the Radeon RX 9070 at $549 with the XT version being only $50 more at $599. I am not the biggest fan of this because the $50 difference is not enough to really consider the RX 9070 (non-XT). Spend the extra $50 and get the better card. I really think AMD needs to work on their segmentation a bit better, they did however do the same thing with the Radeon RX 7900XT and XTX. The best price I was able to find for ASRock’s Steel Legend OC card is $639.99, which is only a $90 premium. I would say considering the premium’s we’ve seen lately that is not that bad!
